Vulnerable (Barons of Sodom) (2 page)

Tucker LaRouche dropped the kick on his humming Harley,
letting the machine purr to silence beneath his powerful legs. Though his
beloved bike was finished in a mustard yellow, it looked golden now from the
recent rain. He'd driven through a summer cloudburst on route 66—the kind of
downpour that pelted the earth, made mud of the plains. The biker ran a cracked
hand through his glistening hair (thick as a lion's mane) and shook his hand
free of clinging droplets. He heaved a sigh of relief: finally, here in the
garage, he was dry.

LaRouche was a tall man—6”4, when he didn't slouch—but less
than lanky. Strong. His legs were trunk-like. His trim waist was defined by a
bulging six-pack, which now puckered through his clinging t-shirt. Tuck carried
himself with an almost intimidating sense of gravity, which those who knew him
intimately might have attributed to the famously enormous member swinging
between his legs. “Tuck couldn't tuck if he tried,” ran the joke. Whatever. The
man himself didn't pay much attention to gossip.

His skin was a golden, weathered tan, occasionally blemished
by a scar. He'd seen plenty of battles, and each mark on his body told a story.
Curved comma print slithering from the edge of his jeans up to the fuzz around
his belly button? Rusty nail. Raw scrape on the back of his left shoulder?
Vindictive old lady. Gash on the right knee? Bike accident. Splash of acid
(just a few drops, but still) dancing towards his ankle? Club initiation rites.
Proof of his mettle. Tribal tattoos covered plenty of other dust-ups.

At long last, Tuck dismounted. The bike had grown cold
beneath his frame. He could hear wafting strains of Motown moving across the
garage, growing louder and louder as his ears re-adjusted to the close space.
Clarence Carter—
Slip Away.

“You're late, bitch!” called a familiar voice. This voice,
in fact, belonged to Athena Sark, head of the autobody shop that catered
exclusively to the Barons of Sodom MC. Athena had been Tuck's unlikely best
friend for most of both their lives. Like him, A was thirty, tough as nails,
and a foul-mouthed. She could also handle all American-made transmissions, a
Colt .45, and her whiskey.

“Would you believe me if I told you I hit another
armadillo?” Tuck said, rubbing the stubble on his jaw.

“Fuck you, asshole,” his friend snapped. But Athena smiled,
just before she lowered herself onto a skateboard and scooted below the body of
a beat-up looking Coup de Ville. Tuck cherished the brief flicker of affection.
Athena reserved her rare smile for sparring with Tucker, preferring to scowl
most of the time.

His best friend had a fountain of springy dark curls
(courtesy of some deadbeat father, lost to the four winds these days)—though
she often wore her hair below a blue kerchief when she worked. She was a tiny,
compact little woman. Most of the other Barons had fallen in brief, violent
love with Athena at some point. They loved her toughness, and her wit, and
especially the cantaloupe-sized breasts she'd struggled all her tomboyish life
to hide. But Tucker had never touched those breasts. And under pain of death,
no other rider had or would while he was Lieutenant at arms in the Barons of
Sodom MC.

“You know the meeting's at midnight, right?” Athena hollered
from beneath the car. “All the boys have been making a big fuss about it.”

“Uh-huh. And since when do I go to meetings?”

Athena yanked herself back into his sight—Tuck noticed a
smudge of oil grease spattering the freckles on her left cheek. “Since they're
set by the man upstairs,
tough guy
.”

Tuck lit a cigarette. He was just beginning to feel dry
again, in his boots. “What are you talking about, A? G never calls meetings. Not
since...nope. Never. Drag?” He proffered his Newport, but Athena waved it away.

“Well he's called one TODAY, Tuck. And it's at MIDNIGHT.”
Then Athena cast one of her withering glances in the direction of the hot-rod.
“And your ride's a mess. It'll take a night's work to clean those headlamps...”

“Oh, you just love to bitch.” Tuck stooped low to give his
best friend one of the sloppy cheek kisses she'd always claimed to despise. He
extinguished his light, gave his long, dirty blonde mane a final shake, and
moved out into the moist night. It was a few moments to midnight yet.

Below the callow moon, Tuck peeled his clinging T-shirt off
his back. He stretched his arms wide before gazing up at the stars. That was
one nice thing about West Texas: you dried fast. Tuck felt a warm tickle of
summer breeze move across the hairs on his chest, ridding him at last of all
the remaining rain on his skin. Then, into the night, he howled. He spread his
mouth wide and howled up at the moon like a wolf—then he listened sharply for
the echo his noise made. When the bellow reverberated back, he raised his arms
and laughed. Probably looked and sounded like a crazy man, to anyone who should
have happened to see or hear—but Tuck put a lot of stock in his lupine
qualities. He wanted the world to know, always, that he was a wild thing.

All this week, Tuck had been racing the plains in fits of
evening insomnia. It had been a mere four months since he'd accepted the
eminent honor of club Lieutenant at arms (a.k.a. right hand man to the club
leader himself), but there'd been little action for the Barons since their recent
re-location to the Lone Star State. The club had moved to this slightly higher
country from low Baton Rouge, where the Barons had spent a few profitable
seasons flipping property and strong-arming the black market. The swamps had made
for poor riding, though, lacking the most important thing for a man on a bike—solid,
serious racing grounds.

When the leader had learned of a particularly lawless slice
of Texas, he'd picked up his troops and moved them South.
We'll find plenty
of business to drum up in Waco,
the man upstairs had promised. Only now,
four months had passed as the Barons merely twiddled their powerful thumbs. The
most restless in the club spent their nights chasing poon at local dive bars.
Tuck himself spent many nights just like this one—zooming over dark, flat earth
until his mission terminated in Athena's garage. They'd shoot the shit
(meaning, she'd bitch about the various injustices that had befallen her in the
last twenty-four hours) and split a pack of menthols before turning in, near
dawn.

Though he saw the attraction in routine—and would never
admit as much to the man upstairs—Tuck found the low country boring. There was
no nearby New Orleans, with its sweet, endless streets of booze and women, that
feeling of constant celebration. There'd been something so sexy about the humid
air in that town—every night by the swamps made a man want to fuck. Plus, he'd
come up in New Orleans—it was his first
real
home, after he ran away
from the one he was born into.

Tuck had become a man on Chartres Street, busking, grifting,
taking odd jobs, frequenting the bar where a then underage Athena had conned
her way into a job—until one fine day a man with a face like a craggy mountain
had said, “son, you'd make a helluva gun for hire.” It hadn't taken a whole lot
more than seeing a series of the bikes lined up in a Rider garage—each of them
bright, beautiful, heavy with the promise of adventure. “If you come with me, you'll
get one of these first thing,” the leader had said. So Tuck had packed up his one
bag and his best friend (she was so handy with a pair of pliers) and brought
them both into the folds of the Barons of Sodom—and for his surrogate family,
this the most loyal of all possible families, Tuck laid down his life as often
as he had to. To date, he'd done absolutely anything that the chief required
without questioning—he'd stolen, he'd intimidated, he'd broken things, he'd
started fires. He'd killed. Tuck was the perfect soldier, and in return he was
often rewarded with first-hand knowledge of the club's inner-workings. He was
trusted.

And yet it was uncharacteristic of the chief to call
midnight meetings. As there was much less crime to contend with in the new
city, the riders had found remarkably little “business” to occupy their time.
There were card games, there were short grifts, but nothing major was cooking. The
subject of the gathering was either good news or bad news—but either way, it
was something.

“TUCK. DON'T MAKE THE CHIEF WAIT AROUND WITH HIS THUMB UP
HIS BUTT!” Athena hollered, her voice sharp and shrill. The biker turned from
the night and retraced his steps into the canned light of Athena's garage.

“Sheesh, milady. I'm
going
.”

BRIDIE:
Mr. Reginald had brought over a cheap bottle
of champagne, and Aunt Caroline struggled to pop the cork. Her date insisted
that he wanted to “get to know me” before I was banished to the outdoors, so I
knew I had a few moments to engage in what my auntie called “adult
conversation.” These were merely the most basic of pleasantries, but I liked to
jabber for a while when I got the chance. Rocks and lizards didn't exactly make
for exciting prairie home companions.

Mr. Reginald walked around our cramped little trailer like
it was a movie star's—he had this way of walking, this kind of strut. He would
pick up objects (my aunt's crotchety pottery) and then set them down again.
Made me feel like our little shit-hole was a museum. And as he moved, I
remember wanting so badly to impress him. I wished I could have convincingly
told him one of my stories about my long lost, adventuring mother. He seemed
like the kind of fella a gal could trust, you know? Perhaps he wouldn't have
judged what my aunt was so quick to call an “overactive imagination.” Just as I
was drumming up an intro line, he put his serious gaze on me:

“You don't seem eighteen, you know. Bridie, was it?”

“Maybe that's ‘cause I'm seventeen. Got two more days.”

The tall man laughed. I watched the ebbing sunlight flicker
around his face as he moved, the crown the tops of oak trees seemed to give him—we
had this one crummy window, and light skewed through it during one particular
hour in the evening. Fireflies were starting to hum against the screen.

“I mean you seem much older. It's in how you carry
yourself.”

My aunt started to hum noisily from that teensy enclosure we
called a room a few feet away. I briefly wondered if she could hear us. I
didn't know much about the world, but I knew Caroline wasn't going to be keen
on her date lingering over her niece's age...but then, she'd already had a hit
or two, and her eyes were glassy and her motion was slowing down. It was funny
even then—I had trouble situating Mr. Reginald amongst the usual cast of
dweebos and super-creeps that Caroline liked to keep around. Didn't even seem
like the type who cooked up. And again, the way he looked at me.
Something...smart, behind his eyes.

I don't remember moving toward him, just as I don't remember
him moving toward me. But suddenly we were standing side by side and I could
feel his body heat moving through the fabric of his cheap suit. I smelled his
sweet musk again, wondering briefly what the name of his fancy cologne was.

You have to understand—I was so lonely out there. No one
talked to me, no one even
looked
at me. My only company was my aunt, and
she got to the point where she was zonked all the damn time. So when Mr.
Reginald put his hand on me, my whole body shivered. He took the pad of a thumb
and moved it across my jawline.

“You're a beautiful woman, Bridie. But you knew that.” I
nodded, though I knew he was wrong, about my being a woman, that is. I was just
a dumb little kid. Probably closed my eyes and leaned in to kiss him or
something...some shit I'd seen from a movie. Next thing I knew he was chuckling
softly into my hair, and I could hear the vehement clinking of our tin forks as
my aunt set the table.

“Better go,” Mr. Reginald murmured, “though we can continue
this later, if you're keen.”

My heart was throbbing. My stomach was balling into a
quivering knot—a knot full of anxiety, joy, and what I'd figure out later was
desire. He was going to put his hands on me, I thought to myself. One way or
another. Just get through this dinner, and then this beautiful man is going to
touch you in your secret places.